007 Legends Review

By Ned Jordan

As a lifelong James Bond fan, the prospect of a game that took you through some
of the long-running series' most memorable moments was pretty exciting. And 007
Legends managed to completely kill that excitement long before I finished the
game's opening chapter drawn from the Goldfinger film. First there's the game's
narrative, or rather complete lack of one. I could follow what was going on in
each level only because I had seen each film more than once, and even then it
was a little hard to do at times since the game has taken some rather large
liberties with the storylines. If you haven't seen all of the films represented
in the game, then you'll essentially be jumping from one relatively random level
to the next.

The premise here is that the game is actually a series of flashbacks experienced
by Bond while he is falling into a Turkish river after taking an errant sniper
bullet fired by a fellow agent. If you've seen Skyfall, you'll recognize this
scene from the movie and realize that 007 Legends is taking place in Bond's mind
while the film's opening credit sequence is playing out on the screen. This
premise manages to make even more of a mess of the storyline, because films
associated with Connery's or Moore's Bond now feature Daniel Craig in the
starring role, and freely mix 1960s spy technology with new millennium tech like
smart phones equipped with biometric sensors.

This all could have worked spectacularly if done right - an alternate timeline
in which Craig's Bond squares off against Goldfinger in the early 2000s
certainly sounds intriguing. But it doesn't work when you completely fail to
provide any narrative cohesion between the levels and try to turn Bond into
Frank Mason or Soap MacTavish.

The game's Call of Duty style of gameplay is a rather odd approach to making a
Bond game since the fact is that in the movies Bond's kills rarely come by the
dozens in open firefights. If you are going to go in that direction then the
gameplay needs to be enjoyable enough for gamers to forget about how incongruous
everything is. Poor level design - do endless corridors have any place in modern
level design? - is just part of the issue; at the heart of the game's problems
is the enemy AI. It is so completely broken that at times the game is laughable
and at others completely infuriating. Enemies will sometimes sit behind cover
popping up and down like a jack-in-the-box until you put them out of their
misery. At other times they'll run between cover spots not to seek better
protection or a better firing position, but merely for the sake of jumping back
and forth. And they have no qualms about running right into your line of fire
even though they must push through a stack of their compatriots' corpses to do
so.

A James Bond game? Really?

While devoid of any basic combat skills, enemies do possess the uncanny ability
to see you behind walls or cover - and they seem to possess the weapons to shoot
through that cover. On more than one occasion I started taking weapons fire
through a wall from an enemy in the next room or RPG fire that passed through a
vehicle on its way to hit me.

The game does implement rudimentary stealth mechanics in an attempt to remind
you that Bond is a super spy and not a Special Forces operative. You can try to
sneak your way through a level by crouching as you move and avoiding enemy sight
cones, but inconsistent enemy lines of sight and an inexplicable inability to
hide bodies after a stealthy takedown usually mean that you'll be sighted sooner
rather than later. And when you are, you just end up in one of those massive
shootouts with brain dead enemies anyway, so you may as well skip the stealthy
approach entirely. Unfortunately, the game does throw some mandatory stealth
sequences your way, and since being sighted means instant mission failure you'll
wish that the game had dispensed with stealth altogether.

Since there weren't enough frustrating aspects to the game already, the
developers decided to toss in quick-time events as well. It's bad enough that
you have to play yet another game that relies on this lazy game mechanic (does
anyone out there actually enjoy quick-time gameplay?), but the game's
registration of your button presses is so spotty that it leads to a lot of
frustrating failures. Not only that, failing at a quick-time event sequence
rewinds the gameplay to a point well before the quick-time sequence, forcing you
to replay stretches of the game as punishment for your failure.

Even though I feel that at this point I'm just piling it on, I do have to point
out that the game's graphics leave a lot to be desired. The character models are
poor, the textures are blocky, and the general lack of any details in the
environments is quite conspicuous. The whole thing looks like it was ported from
a Wii version of the game, which is interesting since the game hasn't been
released on the Wii. Perhaps it was originally developed for the Wii, only to
have that version abandoned due to the timing of the release coinciding with the
launch of the Wii U. And perhaps I'm giving the game too much credit here...

If you manage to summon the stamina to force your way through this mess of a
single player campaign, then you can give the multiplayer mode a go. The
multiplayer game is so similar to that in last year's GoldenEye: Reloaded
(except that the number of players support has been inexplicably cut from
sixteen to twelve), that I suspect that GoldenEye's multiplayer code has been
repurposed for use in 007 Legends. You can select to play as a Bond villain
drawn from the canon of films in the deathmatch Legends mode, which also seems
to be the mode that you have the best chance of joining a game in. There are a
couple of interesting modes such as Golden Gun (one hit kills with the titular
weapon, kill its wielder to get the gun for yourself) and Escalation (each kill
grants you a better weapon, two deaths in a row and you drop a level). There are
thirteen game modes in all which cover pretty much all of the types of modes
you'd expect with the exception of a capture the flag variant. There are some
modern shooter trappings here such as level progression, but the gameplay itself
looks and feels decidedly last-gen.

If going online is not your thing, you can try to get more mileage out of the
game in its challenge modes. These are a collection of levels that fall into one
of three categories: assault, defense, and stealth. Beat a level and your score
is recorded and the next is unlocked, with your goal being to finish all of the
modes and then go back and improve on your scores. The same issues that plague
the campaign game in terms of shooter mechanics and stealth are here, too, so
whether you can find the stamina to subject yourself to completing all of these
levels when you could be spending your time playing something more enjoyable is
questionable.

Final Rating: 40%. The only thing legendary about this game is the mess it makes of the Bond franchise.